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I'd like to see metrics for Turkish. I was told by a native speaker that it developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes and I've lear

by Oarch 3y ago

I'd like to see metrics for Turkish. I was told by a native speaker that it developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes and I've learned it as a foreign language for a couple of years. There's an unusual level of modularity, concatenation and configurability to the base verbs. For instance "we were not able to buy" can be expressed as a single word (I think it's alamadık but someone correct me)

retrac 3y ago
I would say that Turkish is just "normal". Very typical. Often used alongside Japanese or Cree in linguistics textbooks as an example of how a "typical" language works. Fully regular affixes (what you call modular concatenation is known as agglutination in linguistics). And it has a heavy focus on verb modality. Japanese and Mongolian grammar has many syrprising similarities to Turkish (all those languages are unrelated as far as anyone knows). "I was made to read it repeatedly" can be one word, a verb with the right suffixes. The Indo-European languages with their irrgular suffixes and inflections are actually unusual. Many languages have no irregular verbs, for example. Most that have irregular verbs, only have a couple. For some inexplicable reason, many Indo-European languages have dozens and dozens. This is a major outlier.
- rurban 3y ago
  Unrelated? Japanese derived from Turk languages, sorry. Ant the whole study doesn't take into account the speed of spoken languages, where and how the vocals or consonants are formed. Guttural consonants need much more time to be formed than labial. We had that simplification (ie speedups) with the German Second Lautverschiebung (and elsewhere), and then we can see how English bypassed Bavarian German in terms of simplicity and speed. or the esp. new greek, which consists mostly of labially formed sounds, just to be able to speak faster. Greek is missing which is highly suspect, because because every linguist should know that Greek should be the fastest spoken language. Now slow guttural sounds.
  - Asraelite 3y ago
    > Unrelated? Japanese derived from Turk languages, sorry. Yes, unrelated. Please don't perpetuate the now widely discredited Altaic hypothesis. If you must bring it up, at least acknowledge that it's highly controversial.
eynsham 3y ago
> I’d like to see metrics for Turkish. Turkish is in figure 1; its blob is on the lower end. > developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes A crude statement of this view would be pseudohistory. It’s common enough for registers of language to develop (and even diverge) in particular social circumstances, and so it wouldn’t be wholly surprising of a military register of Turkish were to have emerged. But there have been lots of other influences on the historical development of Turkish: for example, Arabic and Persian influence, especially in literary Ottoman Turkish; the natural evolution of the vernacular during the Ottoman period; and language reform under the Türk Dil Kurumu to remove Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Any plausible claim of this kind would have to be about the relative influence of military registers. It’s also not obvious whether the needs of military communication would be particularly different from e.g. industrial communication, or whether that would prioritise speed over e.g. accuracy gained from redundancy.

by Oarch 3y ago

retrac 3y ago

I would say that Turkish is just "normal". Very typical. Often used alongside Japanese or Cree in linguistics textbooks as an example of how a "typical" language works. Fully regular affixes (what you call modular concatenation is known as agglutination in linguistics). And it has a heavy focus on verb modality. Japanese and Mongolian grammar has many syrprising similarities to Turkish (all those languages are unrelated as far as anyone knows). "I was made to read it repeatedly" can be one word, a verb with the right suffixes. The Indo-European languages with their irrgular suffixes and inflections are actually unusual. Many languages have no irregular verbs, for example. Most that have irregular verbs, only have a couple. For some inexplicable reason, many Indo-European languages have dozens and dozens. This is a major outlier.

rurban 3y ago
Unrelated? Japanese derived from Turk languages, sorry. Ant the whole study doesn't take into account the speed of spoken languages, where and how the vocals or consonants are formed. Guttural consonants need much more time to be formed than labial. We had that simplification (ie speedups) with the German Second Lautverschiebung (and elsewhere), and then we can see how English bypassed Bavarian German in terms of simplicity and speed. or the esp. new greek, which consists mostly of labially formed sounds, just to be able to speak faster. Greek is missing which is highly suspect, because because every linguist should know that Greek should be the fastest spoken language. Now slow guttural sounds.
- Asraelite 3y ago
  > Unrelated? Japanese derived from Turk languages, sorry. Yes, unrelated. Please don't perpetuate the now widely discredited Altaic hypothesis. If you must bring it up, at least acknowledge that it's highly controversial.

eynsham 3y ago

> I’d like to see metrics for Turkish. Turkish is in figure 1; its blob is on the lower end. > developed over the years for efficient military communication purposes A crude statement of this view would be pseudohistory. It’s common enough for registers of language to develop (and even diverge) in particular social circumstances, and so it wouldn’t be wholly surprising of a military register of Turkish were to have emerged. But there have been lots of other influences on the historical development of Turkish: for example, Arabic and Persian influence, especially in literary Ottoman Turkish; the natural evolution of the vernacular during the Ottoman period; and language reform under the Türk Dil Kurumu to remove Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Any plausible claim of this kind would have to be about the relative influence of military registers. It’s also not obvious whether the needs of military communication would be particularly different from e.g. industrial communication, or whether that would prioritise speed over e.g. accuracy gained from redundancy.